Martina Nehrling: Color Overload at Zg Gallery

Several openings are taking place this Friday, June 4, and one of the most colorful features the work of Martina Nehrling at Zg Gallery.  Just in time for the spring turning into summer, longer days and the general cheer that comes along with well-deserved and long-awaited nice weather, a new show of Nehrling's paintings and works on paper, What the Walls Heard, opens in River North. 

Nehrling's signature colors and short brushstrokes make up dizzying, rhythmic spells that engage and capture the viewer.  Martina states, "My paintings are visual rhythms inspired by the cacophony of daily life, at once the weight and the flimsiness of it.  Compelled by the pulsation of the beautiful and horrific relentlessly clashing, I create compositions of accumulation.  Grouped or tangled together, I use multiple distinct brushstrokes for their graphic directness, but highly saturated chroma in order to heighten the effect of color's imprecise language."

Nehrling received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC.)  Since she will be present at the opening on June 4, stop by to talk to her in person about color, and more. My office is very, very close to the gallery, and I walk by the gallery windows a few times a day.  I really like Nehrling's work and am looking forward to being so lucky as to see it on a daily basis soon.  And her work is worth remembering for the days (hopefully far away) when Chicago skies are anything but colorful...  And when those days come, if you can't afford to take one of her paintings home, at least there's a book!